Prichard Art Gallery Showcases Graduate Artwork in Exhibit

Tuesday, April 10 2012

MOSCOW, Idaho – Before walking across the stage to receive their master’s degrees, two graduate students will showcase their artwork at the Prichard Art Gallery during the annual Graduate Art Exhibit.

The exhibit will run Friday, April 13, through Saturday, May 5, with an opening reception held on Friday, April 13, from 5-8 p.m. at the Prichard Art Gallery.

”This year the MFA exhibit will feature two students who use the gallery as a space to create elaborate installations,” said Roger Rowley, director of the Prichard Art Gallery. “They will have more space than usual to explore their ideas. It should make for quite the visitor experience.”

The two graduates to exhibit their work are Allie Feezell and Youdhisthir Maharjan. The students have created, researched and written about their work for three years, culminating in the thesis showing of their artwork.

Feezell describes herself as an artist creating metaphysics. She attempts to transcend ready-made concepts while dispensing the representation through symbols and present the vital forces of life itself. She uses natural fiber fabrics and other organic objects to modify the space the viewer can walk through along with video projection to immerse the audience in her ideas.

“The underlying essence of Taoism and Zen Buddhism is to lose the sense of an individual self, to understand absence and to have no worldly attachments while still understanding the interconnectivity of all,” said Feezell. “Absence and non-attachment are nearly inconceivable in our contemporary world thus it seems that only through form may we come to understand emptiness. Let us embrace the silent gap and be satisfied with an emptiness that can never be filled by objects meant to target our manufactured desires.”

Of his work Maharjan said “my interest is an expression, allowing phenomenological awareness. Not in the business of explaining and describing. Only experience interests me, explanation is useless.” His elaborately patterned wall pieces envelope the viewer in a cross cultural experience informed by Maharjan’s Nepalese heritage.

This exhibit is free and open to the public. The Prichard Art Gallery hours are: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; it is closed on Monday. The gallery, an outreach facility of the University of Idaho, is located at 414/416 S. Main St. on the corner of Fifth and Main streets in downtown Moscow. Additional information is available at www.uidaho.edu/prichardartgallery.
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